Jana Wood
Meandering in Places, Spaces and Grids
This painting and drawing project has focused on the use of the grid as a framework for engagement with spontaneous mark-making that is derivative of the natural environment. The grid acts as a surface structure, creating space, rhythm and pattern, despite it being an apparatus that imposes rules and repetition. The gestural marks are independent of the underlying system, defying and disrupting it, and dissolving any fixed perspective.
Research into the art historical paradox of the grid's aesthetic possibilities - as being both space and picture plane, spiritual and rational - has led to reflection on this modernist paradigm that extinguished chance, mysticism and nature in its utopian vision.
